WebProNews

How the mighty have fallen - for a combined total of 2 hours and 52 minutes.  That interval is the amount of “downtime” experienced so far this year by the top three search engines, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of, considering we’re over 2,000 hours into 2007.

But between the three companies, there were some large performance gaps.  Yahoo, according to Pingdom, has been down for exactly zero minutes.  Google has been down for seven - not bad, but not great when faced with a competitor’s perfect record.  MSN’s offering followed far behind with 1 hour and 48 minutes of downtime.

For a look at how Pingdom arrives at these statistics, we can examine its Google-related data.  Pingdom keeps a running total of how long it has monitored a given site, and gives day-by-day and month-by-month breakdowns of their up- and downtime.  Look closely, and you’ll see that Pingdom believes Google experienced three minutes of downtime earlier today.

Do you believe it?  You should, but it’s always nice to get some outside confirmation.  Bogdan Popa’s independent article, titled “Somebody Call 911!  Google Is Down!” corroborates Pingdom’s numbers.

Pingdom also has downtime data for other sites other than search engines; in fact, it has data for every site from Alexa’s top twenty.  eBay’s doing rather well, for example, with just six minutes of non-functionality.  Blogger is a mess, relatively speaking - 4 hours and 47 minutes of downtime so far this year.

At this very moment, so far as I can tell, all of the sites mentioned in this article are “up.”  Bully for them.